20 A Programmer’s Guide to the Mind
For example, for a while we were under the impression that every
Exhorter person learned all of his lessons from the school of life. Then we
uncovered another subcategory of Exhorter person which, rather than
shying away from books, plunged into them with great enthusiasm. The
mental room was the same, it was just operating in reverse. The Exhorter
was still a pusher and prodder, but rather than going from life to theory, he
was moving from theory to life. Therefore, we had to modify our picture: It
wasn‟t the trait of learning lessons from life that was fundamental. Rather,
it was the connection between life and theory which was basic. The
direction of mental flow could vary.A
Second, as our research progressed, we began to see that not all of the
traits were the result of conscious thought. Instead, many of the
characteristics of a certain cognitive style were the result of subconscious
processing, as seen from the viewpoint of the conscious room. For instance,
the way in which the Exhorter person prodded others depended upon the
operation of the subconscious Perceiver room. Again, the fundamental trait
of exhorting was there, but it was being modified by the rest of the house,
working under the surface. And, if we looked hard enough, while we could
not see exactly what was happening in these „basement kitchens,‟ we could
examine the „food‟ that was coming up from the „kitchen,‟ and from it
deduce the type of „furniture‟ that existed within subconscious thought.
The result was a composite picture of the mind. Each person has the
same house, but each cognitive style can only see the whole mental
structure through the lens of conscious thought. And yet, in each individual
thinking style, the vague outline of the rest of the house is clear enough to
allow us to determine that particular room‟s place in the completed
structure. It is as if each cognitive style is one piece of a puzzle. Around
the edge of each of these fragments are clues suggesting how this particular
piece connects with the other bits. By putting it all together, we can come
up with the big picture—a model of human thought.
I mentioned that the fundamental traits which we discovered from
personality matched the function of different pieces of the human brain.
The correlation between mind and brain went further than that. We also
discovered that the relationships between the various modes of thought
corresponded to major physical connections within the brain. Not only did
the pieces match, but also the connections between those pieces. While
neurology did not seem to contain enough information about human
behavior to build a general theory about the mind, sufficient details were
known to allow us to test our theory of personality and to confirm that we
were on the right track. This is the approach which we will take in this
A In the diagram of mental symmetry, you will see that the line connecting
Exhorter with Teacher and Mercy has no arrow on it. That means that
information can flow in both directions.